Secrets to getting into a top MBA program

Back in 2004, Nick Hofmeister, who was then working at Microsoft, applied to four highly rated graduate business schools. None of them accepted him. But MIT’s Sloan School put him on its wait list, where he languished for a year until, on the recommendation of a friend who was a Sloan alum, an admissions counselor agreed to meet with him.

“My essays [on applications] were really terrible,” Hofmeister recalls. “The admissions counselor said to me, ‘It’s nice to meet you in person, because your essay told me nothing at all about your personality.’”

Fast-forward 11 years and Hofmeister, who earned his MBA from Sloan in 2007, has since launched three successful companies. His fourth venture is a new site called Fat Envelopes, which aims to help would-be MBAs avoid what he remembers as the “horrible experience” of applying to B-school.

Fat Envelopes’ advice is based on the answers to 45 questions Hofmeister posed to 55 MBAs on a 12,000-mile road trip around the U.S. “I wanted to find out how they got in, and what their struggles could teach a new generation of applicants,” he says. If you were rejected, the site “might help you figure out why.”

Here are five common mistakes that B-school applicants make:

Applying to too many schools. Almost everyone Hofmeister interviewed agreed that the ideal number is just three, or even fewer. “You need to concentrate your efforts where you have the best cultural fit. I can’t emphasize this enough,” Hofmeister says. “If you belong at Berkeley, don’t waste your time applying to Harvard, or vice versa.” Cultural fit is admissions committees’ biggest criterion, and the only way to get it right is to visit each campus in person, Hofmeister says, and focus on getting into the one “where you like the people.”

Hard-to-read resume. “The No. 1 reason for getting your resume immediately tossed out is formatting, not content,” says Hofmeister. “If it’s too dense, too crowded, has an odd font, or not enough white space, it won’t get read. Admissions committee members want something they can quickly parse and understand.” He suggests asking MBAs you know if you can take a peek at their B-school application resumes and then “stealing their format liberally.”

Skimpy section on “work experience.” While you don’t want to clutter it up so much that no one will read it, “this section has to be packed,” Hofmeister says. The main three things admissions committees want to see are leadership savvy, breadth of experience, and quantified results. It also helps to include a mention of what’s unique about your achievements and why you think they make you a great fit for a particular school.

Squeezing enough information into the space without overcrowding it is no easy task. “It takes tremendous focus to convey so much so briefly,” notes Hofmeister. Keep rewriting it until it sings.

Ho-hum extracurriculars. A 15% minority of the MBAs Hofmeister interviewed “vehemently dislike” any mention of hobbies and outside interests, and left it off their B-school applications entirely, he notes. “Most people include it, but only if they have something impressive to say. ‘I finished third in the Boston Marathon’ is good. ‘I like running’ is not.”

Not enough feedback on the essay. Most (73%) of the MBAs in Hofmeister’s research had at least one close friend or family member review their essays and offer constructive criticism. “It should be someone who knows you better than you know yourself,” he says, “which gives the essay an authentic voice.” More than half (60%) also said a recent B-school grad was a “crucial” reviewer.

“You have to tell who you really are, and why you honestly believe that getting an MBA will help you reach your life goals,” Hofmeister says. In his early failed attempts, “I tried to sound like what I thought they wanted. That’s a mistake, because admissions committees can sniff out phoniness immediately.”

Once you’ve asked someone to read your essay and comment on it, listen. “I had a recent Sloan alum read mine, and a lawyer friend who writes well,” Hofmeister says. “Unfortunately, I ignored their advice.”

Why MBAs are becoming less important

As business schools strive to stay relevant while they compete with Silicon Valley for new recruits, here’s one more reason not to go: Your boss might not make you.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal this week, some private-equity firms, which historically required entry-level employees to leave after their first few years to go get a MBA, are now dropping that policy. The article cites Chicago-based private-equity firm GTCR, which will soon begin promoting deserving associates even if they don’t have a graduate degree in business — something that was formerly a prerequisite to advancing in the firm.

Besides skepticism over how much an MBA really enhances someone’s skill set, the policy changes are apparently motivated by the soaring cost of going to b-school, which can put you out $1 million, according to the Journal. Top business school tuition — nearly $100,000 a year at Harvard and Stanford — plus giving up a private-equity job (which apparently pays as much as $300,000 or more annually) while working on the degree, can mean parting with a seven figure sum.

Other private-equity firms, such as KKR & Co. KKR, Blackstone Group BX, Apollo Global Management APO and Silver Lake, also have “flexible” policies on MBAs, the newspaper says, quoting recruiting firm Long Ridge Partners’ Michael Goodman: “Over the past decade or 15 years it’s gone from a must-have to a nice-to-have.”

Even rising to the CEO job may no longer require a MBA. Neither of Blackstone’s heads of its private-equity and real-estate divisions — potential successors to CEO Stephen Schwarzman — have the degree. Nor does KKR’s heir apparent Scott Nuttall.

In an earlier interview with the Journal in March, Schwarzman said that in some cases, an employee is “such a natural athlete,” b-school wouldn’t do them much good. They can “use the firm as their university,” he said.

Still, advanced business degrees are common in the corner office. Seven or eight senior partners at GTCR have MBAs, although the degrees are less common in lower tiers of the firm.

Do B-school rankings really matter?

As a business school dean, I am frequently asked about rankings. Alumni wonder whether their degrees have lost—or gained—value because of rankings, and aspiring applicants fret about which rankings to trust. After all, there are many out there, each with a different formula, and each with a different school at the top. This puts prospective applicants in a position of consulting advisors who rarely agree. Given the element of subjectivity involved, it’s tempting to throw your hands in the air, as many academic leaders do, and conclude that rankings simply do not matter.

But those people are wrong. Rankings do matter, though perhaps not in the way that many would expect.

The basic question is this: how do you measure the quality of a business school? It isn’t necessarily in the number of prizes your faculty has won or how many of your alumni are CEOs. (Even a pre-teen can call himself a CEO, as I was reminded by the latest TechDay New York, which Columbia co-sponsored, bringing together the city’s startup community.) And every business school dean, myself included, will tell you that their school is the best, so as much as it pains me to say, you should probably look past the deans.

Instead, look to the students. It’s in the student network that you will find the metrics that matter for assessing any business school: inputs and outputs. (Sorry for the econspeak, but I am an economist!)

By inputs I mean applications. It’s valuable to know how many applications a given business school receives during a year. It’s also valuable to know whether the volume of applications is trending up or down over the long term. It stands to reason that the marketplace of prospective students will send the most applications to the best schools, which will, in turn, have more selective admission rates. If you study the data on applications—which some rankings provide as part of their research—you will have a key piece of the puzzle.

It’s just as important, however, to know what happens to students when they leave school—the outputs. If the job market deems the students to have received a valuable education, they will receive good job offers. That should hardly come as a surprise—employers want the best employees they can get. Schools that routinely graduate classes at full or near-full employment, with good job satisfaction, have reason to believe they’re receiving a vote of confidence from the market. Rankings that provide data on job offers, salary levels, and other “value added” criteria are providing another critical piece of the puzzle.

Put these pieces together, then, and the picture that emerges might be shocking to some. There are, in fact, top business schools—consistently so—and there is a quantitative way to differentiate them from the rest. The handful of business schools that dominate the upper tiers of today’s rankings no doubt see the input and output numbers you would expect. And because they do, they enjoy the cascading effects of being a top business school, like the programmatic adaptability that comes with financial health, and the ability to build or maintain an extraordinary faculty.

So all rankings of business schools, at least in part, reflect an on-the-ground reality—if they are taking into consideration the inputs and outputs that are key data points. Admittedly, the aggregate difference between schools in the top five or 10 can be slight. However, being ranked #1 versus #10 can significantly impact the perspective of the marketplace. It’s up to each school and each prospective applicant to discern the signal from the noise and act accordingly.

That means that, while rankings matter, if you are thinking about applying to business school, the question is whether the rankings matter for you.

Plenty of people apply to a school because it has reached the summit of a “best-of” ranking, just as many people will see a movie or buy a book after it wins an award. That’s human nature. We want to experience the best. But if you are looking for a particular type of career—as an entrepreneur or a leader in social enterprise, for example—or you know that location will be important for your future job prospects, some schools will meet your needs better than others. In which case, your needs should trump the seal of approval of any publication. You owe it to yourself to do your homework on a school’s academic curriculum, career management efforts, alumni network, and ability to put you in front of leaders who are shaping business today.

In the end, though, finding the top business school for you doesn’t have to be a guessing game. The information needed to identify the best schools is out there, and if you ask this dean, that’s the real business of business school rankings.

Glenn Hubbard is Dean of Columbia Business School. Previously, he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Glenn Hubbard: Why the Internet won’t kill B-School classrooms

At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, MTV began its first broadcast by playing a video for the hit Buggles song, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It was an opening salvo for a revolution in the music industry, which caused no small amount of anxiety for many who foresaw a future of music via television. Of course, MTV has since given way to YouTube, which will make musicians famous far quicker than a DJ will. But video has not killed radio—multiple surveys show that more than 90% of Americans still listen to radio every week. That is hardly the sign of a dead industry. A revolution may have happened, but it did not have the destructive effect a lot of people thought it would.

There is now similar anxiety about a revolution in higher education, as massive open online courses, or MOOCs, proliferate. Since the first such course appeared in 2008, people have asked whether we still need traditional classrooms. Why attend expensive colleges and universities—where costs have far outpaced inflation—when you can receive an education from world-class professors for the cost of an Internet connection? Popular free MOOC providers, like Khan Academy and EdX, have prompted many a headline of this variety.

To worry about the fate of universities, however, you have to overlook the unique advantages of the traditional classroom—advantages that have allowed residential education to withstand numerous innovations in the past, from correspondence courses to television academies. After all, it has long been the case that you could receive a free education from a world-class professor by borrowing his or her textbook from a library, but that free and easy access has not lessened the volume of university applications. Clearly, being physically in a classroom, interacting with a professor and other students, is an irreplaceable component of effective learning. Professors can better assess a student’s learning in person, and adapt their in-class strategies based on immediate, non-verbal feedback. They can also create a comfortable but challenging environment where students will make the leaps that lead to intellectual breakthroughs.

Too much and too little is being made of disruptive forces from technology shaping higher education.

Business schools can serve as a case study. Online courses can meet a demand for certification (i.e., do you know how to do a particular thing?), and even an online degree can be a potentially lower-cost alternative to classroom experience—if that classroom experience does not offer a rich exchange of knowledge, information, and perspectives with fellow students and faculty.

That competition is much less for the best business schools, in which so much of the academic benefit reflects physical connections among students, faculty, and the schools’ practitioner networks. In that sense, the disruption from online education for top schools is likely smaller than many commentators think.

But in an important respect, disruptive forces are larger than many academic leaders imagine. If the Internet is causing a revolution in higher education, and in business schools in particular, it’s in prompting a discussion about how we use classrooms, not whether we need classrooms. Until recently, classroom time could be used to provide a lecture meant to elucidate the readings students would have done beforehand. With the ability to upload that same lecture to the Internet for pre-class viewing, the question of how to use classroom time is forcing faculty members to engage in a deep examination of pedagogy. The trend is toward allowing the classroom to be a space for collaboration, but as faculties engage more with the learning sciences, I expect that a rich array of models for classroom learning will emerge. At Columbia, the guiding principle is to use online capabilities to complement in-class teaching with integrated case discussions, not replace it.

So the online revolution in higher education will be both bigger and smaller than people think: big as a driver of new teaching methodology; small as an existential crisis for the best business schools and universities. Just as people still listen to the radio in a YouTube age, there is much value in obtaining an MBA in the classrooms of the best schools, even as information becomes more accessible outside of the ivory tower than at any time in history. And after all of the hype and anxiety, we will see that the Internet did not kill the B-school classroom.

Glenn Hubbard is Dean of Columbia Business School. Previously, he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

New Emory dean to women: “There is no one way to do your life!”

FORTUNE — Erika Hayes James never thought she would end up with a career in academia. After finishing her doctoral dissertation at the University Of Michigan in 1995, the Bermuda-native pursued job offers in the corporate and consulting world. Yet a well-trusted advisor asked that she tried working as a professor for just one year. James decided to give it a go.

Twenty years later, James finds herself making history as the first African-American woman to lead an elite American business school. Calling herself the “accidental academic,” James will become dean of Emory’s Goizueta Business School on July 15th. In an exclusive interview with Fortune, James discusses her plans for her new role as well as the role she sees herself playing to correct the diversity imbalance plaguing business education.

Edited excerpts:

How did you react when you found out you got the job as dean of Emory?

The reaction was one of pure joy for me and for the opportunity this creates for Goizueta. There is such a strong alignment with my vision and the school’s visions and needs. The overarching values of the school are focused on principle leadership, integrity and ethics and excellence in all dimensions. Excellence is what it’s trying to create for the students at the school and excellence in the faculty and that’s something that I’ve tried to make a cornerstone of my own career. It seemed like a natural fit.

Has the historical significance of your appointment as dean to a top business school impacted you at all?

Going through the process, it really had not. But after seeing the press and how people are reacting to my appointment as a woman an an African-American leading a top business school, it has. When I see it in print, the reality of what that really means hits me. It is not something I spent a lot of time contemplating, but I see why it is so significant. I want to make sure to live up to the expectations I have for myself and the expectations that everyone who cares about business education have for me for this role.

What are your thoughts on gender imbalance in American business schools?

I have been a faculty member or a student in a number of business schools throughout the years. In a number of those, there have been a pretty sizable imbalance between women and men at the student level and women and men at the faculty level. It is an environment that I am familiar with, but we have a real opportunity to change. Having more women exposed to business and seeing business education as a viable career opportunity will certainly be a key driver that I have in this role. It will be part of my responsibility as a woman leading an elite business school.

What was your reaction to last year’s New York Times’coverage of Harvard Business School?

The fact that there was media attention is not surprising. It is a salacious topic that came on the heels of Sheryl Sandberg’s book and the topic of women and business is timely. I am not surprised that that article received so much attention. I was on the faculty as a visiting professor at Harvard and so I have some insight into that particular school. I will say that the examples that were depicted were extreme examples. The underlying issue and challenge is not a Harvard only challenge, it is something that any business school or any other organization might be susceptible to when there is such an imbalance of numbers of men and women. The environment and the culture starts at the top and it is my expectation and goal to create an environment that is inclusive of everyone that steps in the door at Goizueta.

What about the lack of minority leadership at elite business schools?

I know a lot of the tension is given to the dynamics with women in business school, but I will say that I’m not sure it is unique to women. It is more anytime there is a dynamic where there is a sizable majority, dynamics play out, from a pure numbers standpoint between the majority and the minority. I think there is some overlap between [gender imbalance and racial imbalance].

How did your childhood and upbringing impact your career?

I was actually born outside the United States on the island of Bermuda and I was there for a few years with my parents before moving to the United States. I spend my early years in St. Louis and then my more formative years in Texas. Given that I moved around a lot and transitioned a lot it made me very adaptable and flexible and it exposed me to a lot of people and opportunities. My step-dad was a psychologist and so that’s how I learned about the field. In college, I found a discipline called organizational psychology that married my interest in psychology with the business environment context, which made sense to me. I pursued my PhD in that field at the University of Michigan.

What’s your take on the “having it all debate”?

My mantra is that there is no one way to do your life. You have got to make the calls and decisions that work for you. In my own situation, I am married and have two children and my husband and I have been commuting off and on for the better part of 20 years. We have made that work, we have two well-adjusted children and a happy family life. It is unconventional. He is an executive at [Exxon Mobil], which doesn’t have locations in the same places where there are great business schools. So we have had to find a way to make that situation work for us and I think we have done that well. The choices we made wouldn’t necessarily suite others, but for each person the key is finding what is important to you and building a life even it is perceived to be different. No one can live your life but you.